The last great movie Stanley Kubrick made, Full Metal Jacket has an unsettling, broken-backed structure that confused and intimidated many critics when it was released, but is, in fact, tightly schematised and coherent. The first half of the movie, featuring the steady dehumanisation of Marine recruits – most of whose real names we never learn or soon forget – during basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina, is an astonishingly assured piece of film-making (much of it visually inspired by Frederick Wiseman's shattering documentary Basic Training), characterised by judicious use of Kubrick's favourite new toy, the prowling, serpentine Steadicam. Centre-frame is real-life, ex-Marine drill sergeant R Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, essentially playing his Vietnam-era self, and forever bawling an incredible litany of soaringly scatological insults at his raw inductees, who scarcely know what's hit them. The largest target in Hartman's sights, Private "Gomer" Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) becomes, to say the least, a loose cannon, his eyes widening in glee as he learns that Lee Harvey Oswald

Texas tower mass killer Charles Whitman both learned their sniping skills in the Marines. The misogynistic loathing he instills in them finds its brutal corollary in the girl-sniper who calmly decimates the platoon in Hue in the movie's much looser second half. The first half, full of sweeping camera movements and dialogue always screamed and never spoken, attains a level of near-abstraction as human interplay is displaced by hectoring abuse and physical bullying. The climactic battle, filmed in the disused Beckton gasworks, is a mini-inferno of sniper fire and gushing bullet wounds, hard to live through, but impossible to forget.

• This article was amended on 21 October 2010. The original referred to Parris Island, North Carolina. This has been corrected.